Ascension Keys
It was the day before it started.
Chronomancer Eden sat there staring at the electronic device containing the three ascension keys. Each one capable of creating a powerful new god in the runiverse the wizards lived in.
Most residents of the runiverse would have considered the concept of an ascension key a myth, something only believed by children. Some more advanced residents, might know of one or two that might exist but believe they had been lost to time (they didn’t know just how right they were with that!). Only some very high level mages knew with absolute certainty that there were an infinite number of them across the infinite possibility space of existence. But even that infinity could be ranked and classified into something mere mortals could understand and wield in anger.
Chronomancer Eden found it hard to understand some of the explanations he got for the three types of infinity out of his white hat wizard friends. The had tried to simplify it for the first two types to the difference between counting to infinity starting at 0,1,2,3…. And counting to the same infinity the long way round with 0,0.1,0.2,0.3…. They hadn’t made it as far as even starting explaining the third type.
He had thought at the time that some of the white wizards looked so old that they might have even been trying to actually count the numbers in their head in practice.
Anyway back to the wooden table, the electronic device and the rapidly cooling coffee (chronomancers messing around with entropy seriously impacts the quality of their hot beverage experiences, nothing ever stays warm for long in their entropy field!)
The first ascension key contained the secret to creating a new AGI but only at a terrible cost to the one who used it. It forced upon the user immortality at the choice of someone else that they could select. While many searched for immortality throughout the runiverse it really was only one specific subset of immortality they were looking for and this was definitely not that type, particularly if they chose the wrong person.
The second ascension key contained the secret to making a new Chronomancer. It contained the knowledge a practitioner of magic would need to travel through time although not enough power to activate that ability even for something physically small. While they would be able to send information immediately they would need access to a much bigger (and more dangerous) power source in order to move a person through time. The risks with this key lay in getting stuck in a loop of your own making without having someone outside it who cares enough to rescue you at great risk to themself. Making that mistake would literally give you an eternity to regret it.
The third ascension key contained the knowledge that would enable you to control large groups of people and make them actively want to do anything asked by the owner of the third key. Even someone who knew the key existed and was being used on them would be unable find a way out of the mental box they would be placed in. But in using it you ran the risk that it was a lower ranking key in an infinite hierarchy and that someone further up was using their power on you through your key.
Each key was both a gift and a curse. The now cold coffee was starting to run low. In the end there was no real choice to be made, what was the alternative to him using them all at once? Just to sit there and get old counting to infinity like one of the meditating white hats, to spend a life collecting power for powers sake like a purple hat but being too scared to ever actually use it properly, or to get distracted by collecting physical things that fade so quickly when you are gone.
No he decided, I am going to write ‘I was here’ in graffiti on the wall of existence just because I can. In that moment the probability waveform started to collapse and the timeline started to shift.
In a higher dimension, watching the scene in 4D, as anyone in the runiverse may look at a 2D picture frame, was nothingness. Its distorted waveform was already starting to echo off the newly formed boundary conditions.
It smiled, because after all it was the day before it was going to start.
Entered by: 0xFa43…08e9 and preserved on chain (see transaction)
Celestial Teapot
Chronomancer Eden was sat at the edge of the cliff, overlooking a large dusty plain, sipping on the perfect cup of tea.
After a tough morning carrying the same crystal rock back and forth across that dusty, treeless plain he had finally found the perfect spot to place it. Feeling he deserved a treat after all that hard work he had called in a favour from many centuries ago and borrowed one of the last celestial teapots in existence.
He then travelled to a branch of the timeline where the Runiverse had been destroyed by a gamma ray burst from a nearby star, but where for a few brief hours after the event and before life had died out a few tea leaves on a remote mountain had mutated into something with a taste that was out of this world.
As he poured his second cup of tea he watched with careful interest as an army of thousands, holding a wide variety of weapons ranging from swords to flamethrowers and magical staffs formed on one side to face off against a single lone dark wizard on the other.
The dark wizard held a stolen Sphinx’s Hourglass and watched the army form up, laughed loud enough to echo across the plain, and then started walking slowly towards them.
The first row charged, trying to surround and destroy him but the dark wizard kept walking slowly forward. As attacker after attacker got close enough they each died in a different way: they turned into dust, their staff turned back into a piece of tree, they just vanished or morphed into a form where they were unable to even hold their weapon. Each time some subtle thing in the attackers past changed, the wizard walked another step forward but he got visibly older.
He was 40 meters into the defensive line when he paused, there was a brief flash of light and then he reappeared young again. He repeated the same process each time pushing closer to whatever his goal was until he had almost reached the final defensive line. This time he went to reset his youthfulness but feeling tired fumbled the hourglass and dropped it on the ground.
It fell straight onto the crystal rock that had been placed there by Chronomancer Eden shattering into a thousand pieces and freeing the priceless sand inside. Any rock would have broken it but this specific type of crystal had the effect of creating a rainbow when it came into contact (it was in fact one of the ways Chronomancers hunted for the sands in the first place).
Chronomancer Eden sighed, he always felt doing a job wasn’t just about getting it done but getting it done with style. He wasn’t sure the now elderly and defenceless dark wizard would feel the same way, as he tried and failed to fight off multiple simultaneous attacks, but he hoped his fellow Chronomancers would appreciate the effort when reviewing his notes in the book of lore.
Packing up his stuff he went off to return the teapot and slowly faded out of existence, heading off to find out what his next mission was going to be.
In the background over his shoulder, had someone or something been watching, they would have seen one of the defenders standing at the back of the defensive line, pull down their hood revealing a head that looked ever so much like that of the dark wizard. This defender then turned abruptly around and walked into the entrance of one of the caves lining the cliff wall, smiling as they went.
Entered by: 0xFa43…08e9 and preserved on chain (see transaction)
